#hbd eli

The smell of old books was so comforting to Hermione. She'd built her office with that very fact in mind, lining the walls with every book she'd ever lovingly flipped through in the Hogwarts library as well as a few she'd considered throwing across the room at some point in her youth.

She had a special area devoted to books from the restricted section too-- dark and dangerous magical tomes that she, too, kept under lock and key now, even the idea of a child finding them and reading them making her heart race in the worst way.

But her favourite books were the ones she hardly ever mentioned to anyone else. They'd traveled with her as she and Harry and Ron searched for the horcrux, and before that a few of them had been packed at the bottom of her trunk in her years at school.

She knelt down now and pulled a few of them out: the books she'd loved as a child. Grimm's fairy tales, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Harriet the Spy: all books that had shaped her in one way or another. Once she took out a few she going she didn't want to stop pulling out another and another, visiting each one like an old friend.

Hermione Granger wasn't known for being sentimental, but one thing she had always loved and understood was books.